Certain types of infrastructure--critical infrastructure (CI)--play vital roles in underpinning our economy, security and way of life. These complex and often interconnected systems have become so ubiquitous and essential to day-to-day life that they are easily taken for granted. Often it is only when the important services provided by such infrastructure are interrupted--when we lose easy access to electricity, health care, telecommunications, transportation or water, for example--that we are conscious of our great dependence on these networks and of the vulnerabilities that stem from such dependence. Unfortunately, it must be assumed that many terrorists are all too aware that CI facilities pose high-value targets that, if successfully attacked, have the potential to dramatically disrupt the normal rhythm of society, cause public fear and intimidation, and generate significant publicity. Indeed, revelations emerging at the time of this writing about Al Qaida's efforts to prepare for possible attacks on major financial facilities in New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia remind us just how real and immediate such threats to CI may be. Simply being aware that our nation's critical infrastructure presents terrorists with a plethora of targets, however, does little to mitigate the dangers of CI attacks. In order …

Graphical presentations of energy flows are widely used within the industrial sector to depict energy production and use. PNNL developed two energy flow maps, one each for the residential and commercial buildings sectors, in response to a need for a clear, concise, graphical depiction of the flows of energy from source to end-use in the building sector.

We propose a microscopic CFT description of magnetically charged black holes in IIA compactifications on elliptic fibrations based on the Fourier-Mukai transform. The physical derivation of this model involves a chain of string duality transformations including the 4D/5D black hole correspondence. We compute the asymptotic behavior of the microstate degeneracy in a certain limit of large charges and show that it agrees with the macroscopic entropy formula. An interesting aspect of this setup is that the attractor points are situated deep in a hybrid phase of the quantum Kaehler moduli space.

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Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report gives an overview of the concerns related to financing Federal election campaigning. The contents include Campaign finance practices and policy options to address campaign issues

The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have been installed at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan to simultaneously monitor some thousand of stars for such rare occultation events. Because a typical occultation event by a TNO a few km across will last for only a fraction of a second, fast photometry is necessary. A special CCD readout scheme has been devised to allow for stellar photometry taken a few times per second. Effective analysis pipelines have been developed to process stellar light curves and to correlate any possible flux changes among all telescopes. A few billion photometric measurements have been collected since the routine survey began in early 2005. Our preliminary result of a very low detection rate suggests a deficit of small TNOs down to a few km size, consistent with the extrapolation of some recent studies of larger (30-100 km) TNOs.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

At concentrations below 60%, wet hydrofluoric acid (HF) is extremely corrosive to steels, stainless steels and reactive metals, such as titanium, zirconium, and tantalum. In fact, only a few metallic materials will withstand wet HF at temperatures above ambient. Among these are the nickel-copper (Ni-Cu) and nickel-chromium-molybdenum (Ni-Cr-Mo) alloys. Previous work has shown that, even with these materials, there are complicating factors. For example, under certain conditions, internal attack and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) are possible with the Ni-Cr-Mo alloys, and the Ni-Cu materials can suffer intergranular attack when exposed to wet HF vapors. The purpose of this work was to study further the response of the Ni-Cr-Mo alloys to HF, in particular their external corrosion rates, susceptibility to internal attack and susceptibility to HF-induced SCC, as a function of alloy composition. As a side experiment, one of the alloys was tested in two microstructural conditions, i.e. solution annealed (the usual condition for materials of this type) and long-range ordered (this being a means of strengthening the alloy in question). The study of external corrosion rates over wide ranges of concentration and temperature revealed a strong beneficial influence of molybdenum content. However, tungsten, which is used as a partial replacement …

From Introduction: "This report provides a review of the 9/11 Commission recommendations and the status of their implementation at the end of the 109th Congress. The discussions herein are organized on the basis of policy themes that are core of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, rather than a review of every numbered item set out in the Commission's final report."

This report provides information about the Congressional Budget Act Points of Order. Budget Act Points of Order are not self-enforcing. In order to enforce a congressional budget rule, a member must raise a point of order against the legislation violating it.

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At the Savannah River Site (SRS), there remains approximately 35 million gallons of High Level Waste (HLW) that was mostly created from Purex and SRS H-Area Modified (HM) nuclear fuel cycles. The waste is contained in approximately forty-nine tanks fabricated from commercially available carbon steel. In order to minimize general corrosion, the waste is maintained as very-alkaline solution. The very-alkaline chemistry has caused hydrated metal oxides to precipitate and form a sludge heel. Over the years, the sludge waste has aged, with some forming a hardened crust. To aid in the removal of the sludge heels from select tanks for closure the use of oxalic acid to dissolve the sludge is being investigated. Developing an optimized process strategy based on laboratory analyses would be prohibitively costly. This research, therefore, demonstrates that a chemical equilibrium based software program can be used to develop an optimized process strategy for oxalic acid cleaning of the HLW tanks based on estimating resultant chemistries, minimizing resultant oxalates sent to the evaporator, and minimizing resultant solids sent to the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF).

As a part of Bulk vitrification (BV) performance enhancement tasks, Laboratory scoping tests were performed in FY 2004-2005 to explore possible ways to reduce the amount of soluble Tc in the BV waste package. Theses scoping tests helped identify which mechanisms play an important role in the migration of Tc in the BV process (Hrma et al. 2005 and Kim et al. 2005). Based on the results from these scoping tests, additional tests were identified that will improve the understanding of Tc migration and to clearly identify the dominant mechanisms. The additional activities identified from previous studies were evaluated and prioritized for planning for Tasks 29 and 30 conducted in FY2006. Task 29 focused on the improved understanding of Tc migration mechanisms, and Task 30 focused on identifying the potential process changes that might reduce Tc/Re migration into the castable refractory block (CRB). This report summarizes the results from the laboratory- and crucible-scale tests in the lab for improved Tc migration mechanism understanding utilizing Re as a surrogate performed in Task 29.

News release commemorating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Trinity Railway Express, a joint venture between DART and the T.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

To study CdZnTe as a high energy resolution gamma ray detector with a novel new design, and to build a detector array from the new detector design

The experimental Mn K-edge x-ray absorption spectra of La{sub 1-x}Sr{sub x}MnO{sub 3}, x = 0 - 0.7 are compared with the band structure calculations using spin polarized density functional theory. It is explicitly shown that there is a correspondence between the inflection point on the absorption edge and the center of gravity of the unoccupied Mn 4p-band. This correspondence has been used to separate the doping and size contributions to edge shift due to variation in number of electrons in valence band and Mn-O bond lengths, respectively when Sr is doped into LaMnO{sub 3}. Such separation is helpful to find the localization behavior of charge carriers and to understand the observed transport properties and type of charge carrier participating in the conduction process in these compounds.

The Portland District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested that the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) conduct fish-passage studies at Bonneville Dam in 2005. These studies support the Portland District's goal of maximizing fish-passage efficiency (FPE) and obtaining 95% survival for juvenile salmon passing Bonneville Dam. Major passage routes include 10 turbines and a sluiceway at Powerhouse 1 (B1), an 18-bay spillway, and eight turbines and a sluiceway at Powerhouse 2 (B2). In this report, we present results of two studies related to juvenile salmonid passage at Bonneville Dam. The studies were conducted between April 16 and July 15, 2005, encompassing most of the spring and summer migrations. Studies included evaluations of (1) Project fish passage efficiency and other major passage metrics, and (2) smolt approach and fate at B1 Sluiceway Outlet 3C from the B1 forebay. Some of the large appendices are only presented on the compact disk (CD) that accompanies the final report. Examples include six large comma-separated-variable (.CSV) files of hourly fish passage, hourly variances, and Project operations for spring and summer from Appendix E, and large Audio Video Interleave (AVI) files with DIDSON-movie clips of the area upstream of B1 Sluiceway Outlet 3C (Appendix …

Turbine blades in coal derived syngas systems are subject to oxidation and corrosion due to high steam temperature and pressure. Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are developed to address these problems. The emphasis is on prime-reliant design and a better coating architecture, having high temperature and corrosion resistance properties for turbine blades. In Phase I, UES Inc. proposed to develop, characterize and optimize a prime reliant TBC system, having smooth and defect-free NiCoCrAlY bond layer and a defect free oxide sublayer, using a filtered arc technology. Phase I work demonstrated the deposition of highly dense, smooth and defect free NiCoCrAlY bond coat on a single crystal CMSX-4 substrate and the deposition of alpha-alumina and yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) sublayer on top of the bond coat. Isothermal and cyclic oxidation test and pre- and post-characterization of these layers, in Phase I work, (with and without top TBC layer of commercial EB PVD YSZ) revealed significant performance enhancement.

A large variety of corrosion resistant alloys are used regularly in the chemical process industry (CPI). The most common family of alloys include the iron (Fe)-based stainless steels, nickel (Ni) alloys and titanium (Ti) alloys. There also other corrosion resistant alloys but their family of alloys is not as large as for the three groups mentioned above. All ranges of corrosive environments can be found in the CPI, from caustic solutions to hot acidic environments, from highly reducing to highly oxidizing. Stainless steels are ubiquitous since numerous types of stainless steels exist, each type tailored for specific applications. In general, stainless steels suffer stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in hot chloride environments while high Ni alloys are practically immune to this type of attack. High nickel alloys are also resistant to caustic cracking. Ti alloys find application in highly oxidizing solutions. Solutions containing fluoride ions, especially acid, seem to be aggressive to almost all corrosion resistant alloys.

Colleagues of mine have asked me few times why we have today so much interest in Fixed-Field Alternating-Gradient (FFAG) accelerators when these were invented a long time ago, and have always been ignored since then. I try here to give a reply with a short history of FFAG accelerators, at least as I know it. I take also the opportunity to clarify few definitions.